Come and get your meat! My internal Parallax hackathon project

In October we're coming out with an "Animation Kit" including two servos, a PIR, speaker, two Adafruit 12-LED Neopixels and some wires. In Parallax we had a small hackathon where Stephanie, Matt and I each created a project. In keeping with our talents, Stephanie's project is an artistic mobile and Matt's is a synthesizer made by sliding a coin over some leaded pencil on paper. And my effort, well it's just tasteless.

Without further adieu "come and get your meat - I butchered it myself!".

"When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you."

That's one Propeller playing wav files, running servos, fading WS2812 LEDs, and not missing a beat from the PIR.

Try that with an Arduthing and electronic stackers

Ken Gracey

Exactly. Everyone jumps all over Arduino yet Prop is so much better.

For example - my students and I absolutely love James Bruton from XRobots - so don't take me wrong here. The guy will have to use a ton of Arduinos in his robots. I don't remember specifics but he'll have one in each hand, one in the head, each dedicated to a small subsystem.

Besides supercomputers etc how many projects really use multiple Props? I can see pairing a Prop with a Pi (we've done that occasionally for Computer Vision) or a Servo controller if you run out of pins etc (all of which can do PWM minus RX TX etc). I mean we'll use a Prop as a controller connected to XBEE and another Prop in the robot with XBEE. But that's clearly two fully separate systems. If we wanted we could power both and just have wires between the two instead of wireless. It's not a matter of the power of the Prop like in the case of Arduino.

We need the help of all of you to do this marketing. Keith, you do a particularly wonderful job in this way (thank you!).

I realize there are a few legitimate gripes lately about our marketing vision being all education, that we don't do many new releases for Spin (if any), that the P2 isn't occupying the home page (and some resources aren't easily found), etc. The focus on education is the only way we're going to achieve the goal of having a P2 without external funding. Soon, like late this Fall, you'll see us trying to speak to both crowds effectively again:

Education users, who we seem to communicate with exclusively at the moment; and
Commercial users and hobbyists, which would be most of our forum users.

I think that when we have more commercial support in place it will be easier for our commercial/industrial customers to get behind our efforts again. We need your support now and in the future. We expect P2 to be sold to product developers and education (in time, but not initially).